Young Thongor (21 page)

For a very long time, it was evident, the hall had lain untenanted.

Moldering rubbish littered the stone paving of this gloom-drenched hall in which one hundred men could have marched abreast without brushing the walls to either side. Thongor poked among the rubbish of dry leaves, rotten bits of cloth and nameless scraps of ancient leather—and the toe of his boot dislodged a human skull.

Zoroma stifled a cry.

He knew she was thinking of her lover. But this could not be him. The bone of the skull was brown and scabrous with antiquity.

Thongor dispatched some of his troop to explore the nearest galleries, while assigning to a limping rogue named Randar the task of stabling the
kroters
in an antechamber close by the front gate. Then, while a few men under the command of a grizzled old swordsman from Thurdis marched off to take a look at the far end of the colossal hall, he drew his lieutenant, Chelim, to one side.

Zoroma stood, staring blankly about her with wide, apprehensive eyes, absently fingering a protective amulet of white crystal that hung between her breasts. She did not notice as the men stepped apart for a consultation.

“Well, what do you think?” Thongor inquired.

Chelim rubbed his nose, which had been broken once or twice and clumsily reset, and sniffed.

“I don’t like it, lad,” he muttered. “I get the feeling this place is somehow
alive
—watching me—waiting for me to take a false step, before it pounces; or does something even worse.”

Thongor grunted: he had the same feeling, and he liked it little. “This can’t be the citadel of Shan Chan Thuu. Not if the old Omnian sorcerer only lived two hundred years ago! This place has been abandoned for thousands of years—and its true age must be measured in millions of years. Look at that area of wall: the facing stones have decayed away, littering the floor with dust. Why, it would take ages to do that.”

“Aye, lad—and those columns, see how they’re cracked and split and pitted? I’ve seen the sides of
mountains
that looked younger…well, the old legend must be wrong; the sorcerer must have found this place as it is, and made it his dwelling, rather than building it himself.”

“I think you’re right,” the youth grunted. “No one man—wizard or no—could build anything this big. It is a task that would require a nation.” He paused, fingering the hilt of his sword. “I have heard that in the ages before the Father of the Gods created the first men, this world was ruled by wily and malignant creatures known as the Dragon Kings of Hyperborea…and that they entered in the land of Lemuria when all their land was lost beneath the eternal snows of the boreal pole.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the same tale…You think this is some ungodly palace or temple or shrine left over from the fall of the Hyperboreans?”

Thongor nodded. “I do. For I have seen many of the kingdoms of man, and looked upon his cities, yet never till this hour have I seen this fashion of building…not in my homeland, or among the shadowy foothills of Mommur, or in Kathool or Thurdis or Zangabal, or even old Tarakus, the Pirate City or any of the cities of the Dakshina. This is, must be, a survival of some forgotten age before the coming of man.”

Chelim’s face was stolid. “Gorm alone knows what pre-human deviltry these ancient walls have looked upon…or what shadowy forces may linger within, waiting for the chance to spring to life again.”

Thongor uttered a rude expletive. “Keep this in mind, friend. I’ve seen much that the world affords in the way of dangers—ghosts and monsters and dark gods—but never have I encountered anything that could do me physical harm and which could not itself be destroyed!”

Chelim grinned. “Aye, there is that! Sharp steel is a mighty remedy against things in the night.”

The leader of the men Thongor had dispatched to explore the farthest reaches of the hall came up to them then, and their conversation ended.

“Well, Thad Novis, what’s it like at the other end?” Thongor asked.

The grizzled old Thurdan paused to catch his breath from the long hike. “Just more of the same, Thongor: galleries leading off in every direction, chambers opening into halls and corridors—this temple, or whatever it may be, is like a city, a whole city under one roof!”

They ate what few scraps were left, finished the ale, and bedded down for the night in the echoing vastness of the central hall, save for those whom Thongor designated as sentries of the first watch.

That night the first of them died.

6

The Thing that Walks in the Night

Deafening, filled with unendurable agony and horror, the scream rang out through the gloomy castle.

Wakened suddenly from fitful, uneasy slumbers, the bandits sprang up, cursing, snatching up their weapons, staring about for the enemy that had struck abruptly and without warning—but there was nothing to be seen.

Thongor, who had taken a small antechamber off the central hall for his bedchamber, appeared naked in the doorway, Sarkozan, his broadsword, glittering in his hand. Sentries peered about with wide eyes and white faces, but nothing untoward was to be seen. Yet
something
had happened—they could not all have dreamed that horrible shriek.

At Thongor’s command, a head count was taken, and one man was found to be missing. It was a fat, red-faced rogue called Kovor. He had bedded down with the main body of the men, who lay in a ragged circle around the huge bonfire they had built against the night chills. Now his pallet was empty.

One of the bandits suggested Kovor might have stepped outside to answer a call of nature. Thongor dispatched searchers to investigate, but they found nothing.

Urging the sentries to be wary, Thongor bade his men to return to their interrupted slumbers, and withdrew into his little room again. But hardly a single warrior of the band so much as closed his eyes through all the rest of that fear-haunted night.

At dawn, the men refreshed themselves with water from the small quantity they had dipped out of the running stream the night before, when they had camped in the hills. Then the young barbarian organized them into search parties and carefully directed the exploration of the central portion of the monstrous edifice.

In case anyone became lost in the maze of suites and corridors and chambers, he commanded them to scratch the symbol of an arrow on the sill of every portal through which they passed, pointing back the way they had come, so that in any eventuality they should be able to find their way back to the central hall. They trooped out, under search leaders designated by Chelim.

They found what was left of fat Kovor an hour later. A runner was sent back to fetch Thongor and the girl.

“We could
smell
it before there was anything to see,” panted the wild-eyed bandit as he guided the chieftain through the maze of dusty chambers. “Then we found—
this!
”

Zoroma moaned, covered her eyes and turned away.

Even Thongor, toughened as he was, felt his belly writhe and heart sicken within him as he peered beyond the portals of the room of horror. It was a huge, square room, unadorned, its floor one solid piece of unbroken stone. The only element of decoration was a square design cut in the exact center of the floor.

Floor, walls and ceiling were splattered with gouts of blood and gobbets of raw flesh. The stone chamber stank like a slaughterhouse. Kovor had, literally, been torn apart. No fragment could be found that was any larger than a man’s thumbnail. His sword, dented and broken, lay in one corner. His reeking gore flecked and dribbled the interior of the hollow stone cube like a ghastly scarlet dew.

Chelim, who had also been summoned, came up and stood at Thongor’s shoulder, a grim, sickly look on his ugly face. “What kind of thing could have done anything like…this?” he muttered. “There isn’t even enough of him left to bury and say a couple of words over…”

“Fat, puffing, complaining old Kovor…” Thongor said slowly.

There was not much else that a man could say.

* * * *

All that day they searched the endless rooms of the vast citadel, but nowhere did they find any sign of recent habitation. If the ancient Omnian sorcerer had, in truth, made the unearthly castle his habitation, they had yet to come upon the place wherein he had dwelt. There would be books, bits of furniture, athanors and crucibles and aludels and the other apparatus of the magical sciences.

That night, ferociously hungry, they again settled down to sleep, but terror haunted the dreams of every man, and they started awake at the slightest sound.

Toward morning, the second man died.

Thongor staggered to his feet, kicking aside his cloak, cursing vilely, knuckling the sleep from his bleared eyes, grabbing up his naked broadsword. From her pallet across the chamber, Zoroma stared, white-faced.

“Not—another one,” she whimpered.

But it was so. The echoes of the mad scream still sounded through the vastness of the gloomy structure.

The second victim was discovered to be one Orovar, a stolid, close-mouthed Pelormian who had few friends among Thongor’s troop. They did not find his bloody remnants, although they searched all the next day. But he was missing, that was certain.

Thongor questioned his sentries closely. He had put the fear of death into them the evening before, threatening to disembowel any man who slept on sentry duty. But he knew the men were so frightened they would not have dared to fall asleep, not if they had gone a week without rest. Only one of the sentries had heard or seen anything in the least suspicious. None of them had noticed Orovar creep stealthily from his pallet, but one hesitantly said he thought he had seen something—something tall and black and thin—walking silently in the night. He had thought it was a trick of the eyes, of his overstrained nerves, or just a curious shadow cast by the flickering of the flames. But now he was no longer so certain.

Something that walked in the night. Something tall and black and thin. Something that—
killed
.

That next morning, Chelim drew Thongor aside, leaving the old Thurdan veteran, Thad Novis, to organize the search parties.

“What do you say, lad—shall we leave this place before it takes us one by one?” he asked.

Thongor’s strange gold eyes were inscrutable. “Is that what you advise, Chelim?”

The huge Zangabali shrugged, the golden hoops in his ears glinting in the morning light. “You are the chieftain,” he grunted. “But we have no food or water left, and are not likely to find any in this accursed ruin. And the men are very frightened and are beginning to whisper among themselves. All the jewelled treasure in the world will not tempt them to stay much longer in this devil-haunted mausoleum. Thus far you have held them here because they admire and trust you; but before too much longer their fears will get the better of them and they will begin slipping away, by ones and twos, into the hills.”

Thongor folded his arms upon his chest, and bent his head, brooding on the stone paving. At length he lifted his black mane and looked at Chelim.

“You can leave if you like. But if I go from this place now, without finding the solution to this mystery, it will haunt me for all the rest of my days,” he said.

7

Zoroma Vanishes

Thongor came awake suddenly. He could not tell precisely what had awakened him, but something was wrong. Those ultra-keen senses of the barbarian, which are dulled and vestigial in softer, city-bred men, triggered him to alertness. He lay motionless, pulses drumming, searching the gloom with keen eyes and listening ears. He had found it difficult enough to get to sleep, his belly growling with hunger and thirst raging in his throat like a small red demon, but eventually he had drifted off into a fitful, uneasy slumber. Now some faint signal, some vague premonition of danger, drove sleep from him.

Lifting himself on one elbow, he searched the darkness of the far corner of the room where Zoroma slept.

He had not touched her, although he wanted to, and although he sensed her own response to his manhood. Not since he had learned she mourned her lost lover. Although a barbarian, the boy was not without a certain rude chivalry in such matters. But he could not trust the more ruffian-like of his bandits to leave her unmolested—hence he had offered her the protection of his presence. Now his eyes searched the corner where her pallet lay.

And saw that it was—empty!

A tingling shock drove the last vestiges of sleep from him. He sprang to his feet, buckling his warrior’s harness about him, dragging on his boots loosely, not bothering to buckle them securely. His face was grim and impassive, and his eyes burned like fiery coals. If anything had happened to the girl—?

Out in the vastness and echoing silence of the central hall he found the sentries awake and alert, and he questioned them urgently. None had seen or heard anything unusual, and not one of them had noticed the girl as she had crept from the small side chamber she shared with the barbarian youth.

“Shall we rouse the men?” asked one of the guards.